1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to vertical cavity optical devices, and more specifically to fixed wavelength vertical cavity optical devices or arrays of vertical cavity optical devices.
2. Background Art
Vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) are revolutionizing the field of telecommunications. They generally consist of a pair of semiconductor mirrors defining a resonant cavity containing a gain medium of semiconductor materials for amplifying light.
VCSELs have relatively high efficiency, small size, low weight, low power consumption, and the capability to be driven by low-voltage power. They can operate in a single longitudinal mode, or frequency, and produce a circular beam that can easily be coupled into fibers. The surface emission feature allows devices to be packed densely on a wafer, so that two-dimensional arrays are fabricated relatively easily.
VCSELS use semiconductor materials comprised of elements such as aluminum, indium, gallium, arsenic, nitrogen, and phosphorous as the gain medium, and alternating high and low index of refraction materials such as silicon and silicon dioxide for the semiconductor mirrors or distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs).
The lasing wavelength of a VCSEL is determined by the optical height of its resonant, Fabry-Perot cavity. Most commonly the optical cavity height, and thus the wavelength, is determined by the thicknesses of the semiconductor layers in the devices. These thicknesses are set during the growth of the semiconductor layers and are nominally the same for all the lasers on given wafer.
The resonant cavity of some VCSELs also includes an air gap, where the size of the air gap partly determines the output wavelength of the laser.
Alignment of the wavelength of maximum gain for the laser gain media and the cavity modes of the laser, set by the optical cavity height of the structure significantly increases the difficulty of producing VCSELs. This is a big yield problem in VCSEL manufacturing because the optical cavity height is permanently set during the material fabrication process making it impossible to adjust later. Also, this limits the temperature range of useful performance for VCSELs since the optical cavity height changes with temperature due to the thermal expansion of the laser material.
An array of monolithic multiple-wavelength VCSELs requires side-by-side fabrication of VCSELs on a wafer where the VCSELs need to be exactly the same except with controlled, different lasing wavelengths. This presents a problem because the processing used on the wafer must assure that the threshold gain at which lasing begins, the current usage, the efficiency, the losses of light in the resonant cavity, the amplification of the gain material, and the light transmission of the DBR all remain the same. At the same time, the same processing must produce different lasing wavelengths, which is most commonly realized by changing the optical height of the resonant cavity.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but have long eluded those skilled in the art.